privatization

So much for the theory, here’s a bit of grim aid practice (and some top advocacy) to end aid week here on the blog. Lehlohonolo Chefa, Director of the Lesotho Consumer Protection Association (LCPA) reflects on a week when his organization’s report on a disastrous health experiment in his country made big waves at the World Bank spring meetings Lesotho is a small mountainous country with …

Oxfam private sector adviser Erinch Sahan (right) summarizes a critical new review of the growing interlinkages between aid and the private sector Donors have a new love: business. And it will end poverty. Aid chiefs across the world have concluded that if we need growth to end poverty and the private sector drives growth, isn’t aid most effective where it focuses on the private sector? …

The posts are getting longer, so it’s probably a good time to call a halt, but at least you have the weekend to read Kevin Watkins‘ response to Justin Sandefur on private v public education provision (and to vote – see below). If you have even more time, it’s worth reading (and relishing) the whole exchange: Justin post 1; Kevin post 1; Justin post 2 …

Today Oxfam publishes Blind Optimism: Challenging the myths about private health care in poor countries, written by my colleague Anna Marriott. She summed up the arguments in this op-ed on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, and was in Washington this week driving the message home to the World Bank, whose default position of ‘private good, public bad’ has so far proved remarkably impervious to reason or evidence.

It is often argued that municipal sanitation, rather than doctors, ended the periodic scourges of cholera and other disease that afflicted Victorian Britain (e.g. see here). Now the World Health Organization has adopted an even broader version of the argument in the new report of its Commission on Social Determinants of Health. It marks a significant shift in WHO thinking.

This is a conversational blog written and maintained by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of ‘From Poverty to Power’. This personal reflection is not intended as a comprehensive statement of Oxfam's agreed policies.